Yesterday,
Apple made a big deal about an "exciting announcement"
for Tuesday. Speculation was running rampant about whether the
announcement would be in regards to iTunes music streaming or
possibly an official release of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone, and
iPod touch.

As
the day came to a close, the WSJ
had all but confirmed that the “big” announcement would be that
The Beatles catalog would be coming to iTunes. And sure enough, at
10AM EST today Apple made it official.

All
of The Beatles' studio albums are available on iTunes for $12.99 a
piece, or you can download the entire box set for $149.

To
me, this is a rather boring and inconsequential announcement. Sure,
it might
be a big deal to Apple to have the Beatles on iTunes, but for
most Beatles fans, they already have the music on either vinyl or CD.
And for those that didn't already have Beatles music, they could have
just as easily walked into Best Buy to buy the albums, then rip them
straight to their computer using iTunes or any other ripping
software.

Meh!

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

and what good is .flac? What does it do that another format will not do? It won't even play in most portable media players. You can claim the quality etc etc is better but there is a reason digital players standardized on mp3 because it offers a better compromise in terms of file size to quality ratio.

As for the beatles, this is irrelevant today. They are popular with certain ex-hippie groups and tree huggers but generally anyone who gave a crap about them in the first place downloaded everything they wanted for free.

All lossless formats are the same quality by definition and on average compress music about the same amount. Flac should be the best supported because it's open-source. Unfortunately Microsoft and Apple make money from their own lossless codecs so they aren't going to put much effort into their products supporting flac.